The Question That Wouldn’t Sit Still
Books never made me a better person.
There. I’ve said it. Now we can talk about what they actually did instead.
From my window in Rimini, the Adriatic looks like ironed steel this afternoon, and I’ve spent the morning re-reading Proust’s small essay On Reading with a coffee gone cold beside me. The question — does reading turn us into better people? — keeps rolling around in my head like a marble in a glass jar.
Quick warning: I’m going to translate some heavy-duty literary theory into plain language as we go. That’s the deal. I’m a physics guy by training, and simplification is my native sport.
Two Stubborn Men, One Quiet Disagreement
About 120 years ago, a thirty-something Marcel Proust — whom most of his relatives still considered a charming dilettante — sat down to translate John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies into French. He admired Ruskin. He disagreed with him profoundly.
The preface he wrote in 1905 became the seed of the seven-volume novel we now call In Search of Lost Time.
What were they fighting about? Whether books make you good.
Ruskin, the great Victorian moralist, stood in front of a Manchester audience in December 1864 and called his own generation illiterate. Schools were being built, education was expanding, but he watched his contemporaries reading the way we now scroll — for status, for chatter at parties, for the warm glow of being seen with the right title in hand.
Genuine literacy, he insisted, was a training in disinterestedness — in patient, generous attention to the meaning of chosen words. Without it, books became furniture. Worse, they became business cards.
He even tried to speak the language of his utilitarian opponents. A powerful person you meet might be tired, dismissive, having a bad day. A book on a shelf? It puts the keenest minds of every age and country at your service, queueing up to talk to you.
Books, he argued, enrich and empower their readers.
Proust thought this was nonsense.
Not that books are nonsense — but that the moral defence of reading is. He found it absurd to recommend books like recommendation letters into a club of geniuses.
Reading, he said, isn’t a higher form of conversation. It’s something stranger, lonelier, more truly yours. And that’s where things get interesting.
Books as Time Made Touchable
This is where Proust gets quietly devastating, and I’d like you to slow down with me here, because what he says next changed how I think about my own bookshelves.
For Proust, books are never moral instruments. They are something far more peculiar: keepers of sensation.
He noticed that when he picked up a novel he’d loved at thirteen, what flooded back wasn’t the plot. It was the wallpaper of the room he’d read it in, the smell of the linden tea his great-aunt sipped, the light falling at four in the afternoon in a town he hadn’t seen in decades.
Literature, in his view, made time tangible — something to be grasped without being abolished.
I felt this last week. I opened a battered paperback I’d read during a long hospital stay back in 2014, and the salt of that summer in Bologna came right back through the pages. So did the fear I’d been hiding from myself.
That’s what books do. They preserve us to ourselves.
And here’s Proust’s quiet bombshell — the one I want you to sit with for a moment. The miracle of reading, he wrote, doesn’t even depend on the writer being any good. Mediocre books work too.
What matters is that, in the act of reading, you make contact with what he calls the writer’s oeuvring self — the working, making part of another mind. It opens up something parallel in you. You discover regions of your own experience you’d never have suspected were there.
Books don’t deliver the writer’s wisdom into your head. They train you to make sense of words and things on your own.
Proust calls this the “fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
Read that sentence twice, please. It earns it.
The Romantics Who Made Writers into Priests
To understand why we’re still arguing about whether books make us good, you have to know who got there first — and it wasn’t the literary critics on social media.
After the French Revolution, European societies had a problem: the priests had been demoted, and somebody had to fill the role of explaining the nation to itself. The Romantics — Victor Hugo most loudly — proposed that the writer would do it. The poet was now the seer, accountable to the public alone, charged with explaining difficult truths.
But the most careful version of this argument wasn’t written by a dashing young man.
It came from Madame de Staël, in 1800, in a book whose title is a mouthful: Literature Considered in Its Relation to Social Institutions. She believed in what she called “the perfectibility of the human species,” and she thought literature was politics by other means.
By sharpening how citizens used language, she argued, fiction prepared them for self-government. Free people need free language — language that hasn’t been ground down to slogans and transactional phrases that fit neatly inside a tax form.
Behind her stood Rousseau, who’d already said something darker in the preface to Julie (1761). The urban elite, he reckoned, will never read seriously — for them, books are only a posher way to feel superior over a glass of wine.
So the writer, he said, must “speak the language of the lonely.” Address the provincial reader with time on her hands. The writer’s first duty is not preaching virtue, but offering a sober examination of what makes people happy.
Note what’s not in that mission: moral correctness, approved opinions, helpful instruction.
That distinction is the one we’re about to lose, and find again, several times.
The Return of the Moralists
Fast-forward. By the late twentieth century, Proust’s view had quietly won the academic battle.
Critics studied form, depth, ambiguity. The idea that great books made you a better person was treated as charming, well-meaning, a bit naïve — the kind of thing your grandmother believed.
Then the internet arrived, and the moralists came back with new uniforms.
You can see them on both sides of the present culture war. On one flank, conservatives recommending pre-1940 books to inoculate children against modern temptations. On the other, progressives revising the canon for representativeness — sometimes flattening complex novels into morality plays.
Both treat books, as the essay I’ve been re-reading puts it, like processed foods for thought — telling you in advance what you’re meant to take from each page.
Have you ever finished a great novel and felt cheated by everyone who told you what it meant?
If you walk into Greek tragedy expecting domestic warmth, Medea will disappoint you. If you read Madame Bovary as a stern warning against wanting too much, you’ll miss the trapdoor Flaubert built under every page — the one Elena Ferrante so memorably opened, calling the novel a portrait of women caged by traditional marriage and motherhood.
The flaw in the moralising reading isn’t that it’s wrong. It’s that it’s smaller than the book.
That smallness is what we keep paying for, every time we ask a novel to be a sermon. And we’ll keep paying, until we ask something different of it.
What Literature Is Actually For Now
Here’s where I want to make a confession.
I run a science group called Free Astroscience. My day job — when the body cooperates — is translating physics and astronomy for people who never thought they were the type. I love hard data. I respect equations. I trust the scientific method like I trust gravity to keep my chair on the floor.
And yet. When the dystonia is loud and the night is long, it isn’t a physics paper that holds me. It’s a novel.
Why? Because images, including the ones we live inside on our screens, hit us fast and leave little room to argue back. Words on a page move slower.
They allow us a small, decisive margin — a half-second to pause, to disagree, to refuse the easy meaning being slipped into the soup. Literary writing protects the inner space where you do your own thinking. It teaches you not to outsource the work of understanding your own life to whoever has the loudest microphone this week.
That’s the real political function of reading today, and it’s much quieter than the slogans suggest. A novel that sits with complexity does more for civic life than a hundred takes that tell you exactly what to feel.
Think of Neige Sinno’s memoir Sad Tiger (translated by Natasha Lehrer in 2023), a book on incest that refuses the script of “trauma culture.” Sinno herself says fiction helped her more than theory, because fiction offers oblique, tangential answers built from stories that aren’t real.
That obliqueness is the point. It gives readers room to put the pieces together themselves — and then to recognise the same patterns in the world outside the page.
Or Hernan Diaz’s Trust (2022), four nested narratives about money and lies that make you a detective inside your own reading. Or Percival Everett’s James (2024), retelling Twain’s Huckleberry Finn in the voice of the fugitive slave Jim — finally a full name, a full mind, a full claim on the story.
These books don’t tell you what to think. They train the muscle that thinks. And that muscle is going to be the most important one to keep alive in the next decade.
A View from a Wheelchair in Rimini
I’ll be honest with you.
Between 2011 and 2018, I had a deep brain stimulation device implanted, then removed, with everything you can imagine in between. There were nights when I couldn’t write, couldn’t move easily, couldn’t believe in much of anything.
And there were books beside the bed.
Not books that fixed me. Books that kept me company without lying to me.
That’s a small distinction with enormous consequences. The self-help section will sell you certainty in a glossy jacket. Real literature will sell you your own complicated life back, at full price, with all its contradictions intact.
You don’t come out of Anna Karenina a better citizen. You come out of it more honestly yourself — and that, it turns out, is the precondition for being any kind of citizen at all.
This is what I keep coming back to whenever someone asks me, well-meaning, whether reading makes you a better person. It misses the gift entirely.
Reading doesn’t make you good. It makes you free enough to choose.
That freedom matters more, not less, when your body has decided to write its own rules. From a wheelchair, you learn quickly which doors of the world are still open. The page is one of them. The page has always been one of them. And no algorithm has yet figured out how to close it.
Looking Ahead, Slowly
We’re at an odd moment. Fewer people read for pleasure, and the algorithms now do most of the interpreting our culture once asked novelists to do.
The risk isn’t that we’ll stop reading. Books will survive. The risk is that we’ll stop expecting the right thing from them.
So here’s what I think is coming, and what I hope for. As more of life is mediated by images and the swipe, the people who keep reading slowly, with attention, will quietly inherit a kind of inner sovereignty.
Not virtue. Not moral superiority. Sovereignty — the basic capacity to mean things in your own words, in a world increasingly inclined to do the meaning for you.
The sea outside my window is darker now, the colour of slate after rain. My coffee is genuinely cold. And I find myself trusting Proust more than I did this morning, when he wrote that all books really do is partially lift “the veil of ugliness and insignificance that leaves us incurious before the universe.”
That’s not nothing. That’s almost everything.
So pick up a book tonight. Don’t read it to become better. Read it to become more available — to your own life, to the strangers who wrote it, to the world outside your window, to the strange and brilliant fact that any of this exists at all.
Never give up on words. They’re how the rest of us reach you across centuries, oceans, hospital wards, broken bodies, and whatever else stands between us. They’re still working. They’re still here. And so are you.
— Gerd, from Rimini
